8. Dornheim

I knew that Johann Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara Bach had had their
all-Bach wedding in Dornheim on October 10, 1707. Since I couldn't find
Dornheim on my simple road maps, I had decided to skip it. After our dinner
at the lovely Arnstadt market place, we embarked upon a short drive along
the winding Thuringian roads. It was still hot and the sinking sun threw a
golden light over the fields. At the height of the summer, the early
evening hours between seven and nine are my favorite touristic moments
anyway, when everything turns yellow and most traffic is gone. But this was
very special: here I was, with my 83-year old father, enjoying the very same
hills in the summer evening sun which Johann Sebastian Bach must have liked
almost 300 years ago.

Then, all of a sudden, on our peaceful east-bound route, we saw Dornheim
mentioned on a traffic sign, and we decided to pay it a visit after all. The
normal road was blocked, so we had to make a detour (post-communistic East
Germany is full of road-blocks and detours). Normally, it is only two miles to the East
from Arnstadt to Dornheim, but now we had to drive a few extra miles, which
was just as well in this beautiful light.

Although Dornheim is only a miniscule village, it took us a while to find
the little church in which the Bachs got married. The reason is that the
church is not on the road but behind a wall (or rather a combination of
a house and a wall). Finding the church was a real "historical experience".
I only knew the church from black-and-white pictures, but here it was in
full color, with lots of red geraniums catching the late sunlight (picture
on the right). Upon entering the gate, we were at once in the past. There
was nobody else and both my father and I experienced the same perfect
historical illusion.

I made some photographs and climbed the stairs towards the entrance of the
church. In front of the door I turned around and had a second, overwhelming
historical experience. For a while, I imagined that I saw the same as what
Bach saw, when he came out of the church with his young bride:

Well, it was not exactly the same, because Bach didn't see my father but, presumably, a crowd of other Bachs and Bachs. But for a while I imagined
that I could feel Bach's happiness when he came out of that church.

I made some more photographs and my old father and I continued our drive
along those golden Thuringian hills. We were relatively silent, as if all
moments of happiness sooner or later fly away on the wings of melancholy. When
I was a child, my father took me on several trips to foreign countries. He used to have a scooter, which took us all the way across the Alps to Italy in those days. I remembered us having dinner in Lienz, Austria, in 1959 or 1960 in a
Biergarten in the same golden evening light. I remembered how happy I was on all
those trips and was afraid for a while that this might be our last major trip
together. Anyway, Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara got married in October, 1707. She died in Köthen in the summer of
1720, when Sebastian was serving Prince Leopold, who was taking the
waters in Carlsbad. All in all, then, their marriage lasted less than 13 years.

Practical Information

The church can be visited upon request. It is currently under restoration .